Hard-Cooked Eggs

I never really thought about why I don’t cook hard-boiled eggs very often. I love them: deviled, in Egg & Olive, sliced on buttered toast, even plain for a snack or quick breakfast. In retrospect, I think it’s because cooking them is a bit of a pain. I can use exactly the same technique, and for every five times I do it, I get at least six different results. Plus peeling is a bit annoying.

Then I bought an Instant Pot. I’m a bit ambivalent about it for cooking whole meals, although a few have been quite good. It performed spectacularly for cooking chickpeas, so I thought maybe all those folks raving about how well it does hard-cooked eggs might be on to something. Boy, were they ever! I followed the directions on This Old Gal and had eggs cooked to perfection, with shells that peel off with no effort whatsoever. The egg in the photo gave up its shell in just two pieces! How cool is that? My whole life, I’ve soaked freshly hard-boiled eggs in cold water immediately after cooking. It was supposed to make them easier to peel. Sometimes it even worked. Sort of. So I was surprised to see no cold-water step in most of the pressure cooker instructions for eggs. Could so many people have simply forgotten, or never been taught to do that? I decided to do my own test. Half of this batch got the cold water bath, the other half did not. Since I was using the whole batch right away for Egg & Olive, it was a great way to compare. Guess what? No difference! None at all. Score another point for the Instant Pot! Who doesn’t like being able to skip a step?

Technically, the Instant Pot steams the eggs, rather than boils them, which is why I’m calling them “hard-cooked” instead of “hard-boiled.” And honestly, this simply could not be any easier!